The Allies in the World Today

This report presents the Alliance21 Geocultural Branch as it stands in April 2003. It is based on travel accounts, meeting reports, responses to the “Call for Initiatives,” telephone conversations, articles published on the Alliance Web site, and FPH experience records. This overall view is intended to draw a few conclusions regarding the experience and the future of the Alliance21 Geocultural Branch.

Latin America- by Gustavo MarinWe begin with Latin America because after the World Citizens Assembly in Lille in December 2001, the meeting of Allies of the South Cone in Rio de Janeiro in June 2002 was the first geocultural meeting held to envisage the future of the Alliance. It is important to underscore that this meeting was organized by the Allies of the South Cone as an independent initiative. It gathered roughly (...)

North AmericaThe Alliance has clearly not shown great development in North America. Nonetheless, a number of Allies are facilitating a variety of activities in the region, among others, in the United States. We have backed two initiatives from Canada: the facilitation of a network of labor unions on a world level, presented by Alternatives (from Montreal) and a study on civil society and governance (...)

AfricaA progress report on the Alliance in Africa requires, among others, that we make an evaluation of the African Caravan, which began in Cape Town, South Africa, in June 2000, and ended with the Continental Meeting of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in June 2001. Our intention has been to make this evaluation jointly with David Gakunzi, who was the main facilitator of this initiative, but we have not (...)

AsiaA prominent feature of the Alliance is that it is present in the two largest countries of the world: China and India. Moreover, it is significant that, beyond trade relations, the first milestones of a cross-cultural dialogue between these two countries have been placed in the past two years.
For China, the February 2003 meeting in Beijing constituted the end of a stage initiated by our (...)

EuropeTo evaluate the progress of the Alliance in Europe, we can quote Betty Nguyen, who did a recent survey on the subject: “.. . . This experimentation of a European public debate . . . was pursued in the framework of the 2000-2001 Assembly process with the June 2001 European Continental Meeting in Peles. It is flagrant to note that the four themes identified for the meeting (democratic governance (...)

Middle EastThe first contacts with the Allies of this region date back to the Alliance meetings of 1993, but they were not followed up. Since 1998, a network of Allies has been constituted, mainly from Lebanon, thanks to the activities of the Cultural Council for South Lebanon. This network organized several meetings dedicated to questions of regional governance, the Arab World’s place in globalization, (...)

Elements for Consideration and ProposalsThis overall, and most certainly incomplete view allows us to draw some conclusions on the experience and the future of the Geocultural Branch of the Alliance.
While we can observe some slowing down of the activities of the Allies in the different regions, due most probably to a lesser central presence of the FPH, we can note at the same time that groups of Allies have remained active and (...)